Barry Hannah - Long, Last, Happy - New and Collected Stories

In Mexico once when he was young, Coots had shot his wife “inadvertently when the black thing was on me” as they were sporting around with the idea of William Tell, a glass on her head. Coots was drunk, but he insisted on “the black thing.” He believed in spells and even more in guns as he got old. He believed he could think spells on enemies and bring hideous luck to them, or so he wrote in his chilly fictions, where homicide and orgasm were inevitably concurrent and hundreds died in rages of lust and murder; a holocaust of young men perishing was always at least in the background, like wallpaper in a shrine. It was an ancient and beloved tyranny of the cosmos in which desirable bodies were given up religiously.

Coots, queer not gay, was an old-timer who hated “fairies” almost as much as women, or so he wrote. “Queens” were anathema, down there with the dreaded “cunts.” His manly Midwestern prose would scratch out at them. Physically he was a coward, and as he aged in the big city, his paranoia had a field day and became quite adorable to Coots cultists, who were always at him for interviews. His prose was no hoax. He wrote beautifully, especially when he was telling a straight clean story — something “linear.” But too much of this thirties stuff annoyed him and he was apt to launch off into his “genius”—spiteful incoherence, cut-up blather, free-floating time pirates corn-holing each other, etc. He was, though, dead accurate about the century often in this “shotgunning”—it seemed to thousands anyway — as only, perhaps, an old shy queer full of hate can be.

Coots had murdered nobody else (his wife’s accident had cost him a few days in a Mexican jail), but he was proud of the three dogs he had shot in a great city park one twilight, two German shepherds and a Rottweiler, just last year. Their hides were on the wall of the composing room in his “bunker,” a windowless warehouse apartment tremendously padlocked in a cheap nasty section of town. Coots had claimed an attack, and the young amanuensis with him (they were not lovers) did not deny it. There had been high adventure in secreting the gun, getting the animals back to the apartment in three separate taxis, and arranging for their skinning with a jubilant cultist now ten years on methedrine. The legend got out to everybody with whom the cultist had a beer, hundreds. Alcoholism was necessary to balance his speed habit, but nothing balanced his tongue. The story had all three animals, escaped from a wealthy high-altitude widow hag on Riverside Drive, tearing unprovoked at Coots’s legs, with the amanuensis sprawled in terror, and Coots fast-drawing a.44 from his Abercrombie & Fitch raincoat. Coots, swarmed by his interviewers and even by Time , demurred, but there were the three hides on the wall, head shots, no hole in the pelt. Of peculiar literary satisfaction was the fact that the methedrined skinner died a week later, as if taken off by a curse from the shy hermitic Coots.

Coots was now thinking he had successfully hexed Latouche, a man who at eighty-nine had never had a day of bad health, and now the grofft on him, horrible and unlucky. Latouche was of an almost alarming breed. He seemed never to have made a mistake. Neither with his surgery (famous), his wives (he had outlived two fine women devotedly in love with him), his clothes, his money, his charities (quiet and enormous), or his prosperous handsome doctor sons. At billiards he was a wizard and put away other wizards one fourth his age, some of them precocious millionaires of his pattern. The great violent, greedy and rude city had not put one line of worry on his face. He had been a gallant chief of surgery in World War II, at forty-one, with Patton’s racing Third Army, but could have been queer Hitler’s Aryan model. Even in his forties he seemed to be the one for whom Grable showed her amazing legs; he could have been her kiddish admirer and our hope for Over There, Lucky Strike thrust into sidelips with the dash of veteranship forced on him. Latouche could have ridden on sheer image, but insisted instead on Johns Hopkins, Harvard, and the Sorbonne, to emerge a surgeon, powerful before age thirty: athlete (impossible endurance, perfect fingers), intellectual (four ontological approaches named for him), and doting lover, amazingly of his beautiful wives alone. Also he had written about guns, and could outshoot Coots, who was almost twenty years younger.

After retirement, Latouche became a student of man, fresh as a ten-year-old. It was the one thing he’d neglected, mankind. He was making fast time, of course, as usual. His Hungarian sheepdog, his curly pal, was allowed everywhere, even restaurants. Latouche was that kind of darling. Folks loved to have him around and hear his voice, kind and modest, and he could have lived free on what people bought for and gave him. He lived in an apartment on Wall Street very near the waterfront, where men loaded and unloaded international goods. Because he was such a distinguished widower, emblem of a nobler time, the owners of the building allowed him to stay on the top floor in a building where everything else was business. With more dedication than others with telescopes, he began watching the men on the docks, studying the poor, the bitter, the disheveled, the union apes, some with bursting muscles, some gone all punk and crooked with labor. He might have seen Coots down there, with his young amanuensis dickering for morphine, heroin, hashish, opium, or just espresso, Player’s cigarettes, and Stolichnaya, with a man of trade. Dr. Latouche knew nothing much of drugs. He had never done much biochemistry. Fifty years ago he had quit cigarettes. His three cold martinis every evening, no matter where he was, were the only rise he required. He had been close to being an addict of surgery but why not? He did not like drugs, even when he prescribed them in small amounts. Dr. Latouche had never even had a real headache. In his medicine cabinet were Epsom salts, Pepto-Bismol, iodine, and, for visitors, aspirin.

Coots might have looked back up at Latouche’s apartment window, maybe swallowing a Bucet with a fresh cup of espresso if nothing better was to be had. He, just lately, knew where Latouche lived. He was very much on his case, narrowing. Latouche might have mistaken the gaunt, tall Coots in his suit for an owner, a big legitimate importer. Outside his addiction, morphine now beaten, Coots insisted on having his things in order. The shooting of his wife had finally convinced him deeply against sloppiness. The worst of it was the mess. He led a tidy, controlled life. He despised what controlled him. His books railed against control, didn’t they, despite the obliquity? Conspiracies of control were the target for his massed attacks, using stacked cords of bodies out front, behind, flanking. Up at seven for his stomach exercises; fruit, espresso, and pumpernickel toast; cold shower, then hot briefly, beating last night’s cigarette residue from his lungs like Tarzan with a habit; speed-reading the London and New York Times es, especially for dire foreign and space alien occurrences, then more deliciously the personals; next perhaps a novel urged on him by some hopeful who’d pierced through his secretary, a matter of fifteen minutes (Coots had speed-read by sixth grade in St. Louis without realizing it was unnatural). His mind brilliantly plundered the book, storing entire sentences, shucking the rest like a piece of green corn, only a few nuggets in there. Coots cared very little for creative writing other than his own, and was blithely unconscious of any real American literary scene — a part of his charm to his adorers. He would write very slowly and often beautifully, clearheaded, trusting only hashish or a minor barbiturate, with his mild Benson & Hedges cigarettes. At times he would quit one or the other to exercise his control. Coots had lost a rough twenty years stoned, in Tangiers, New Orleans, New York and Mexico, filthy on a mattress, and he wanted to make them count.